Formula One Has a Stake in Brain and Spine Research

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Dr. Gérard Saillant, center, head of the International Automobile Federation’s medical commission, with other doctors in France after the former world champion Michael Schumacher’s skiing accident in 2013.CreditYoan Valat/European Pressphoto Agency

Auto racing, and particularly Formula One, is being increasingly scrutinized because of head injuries linked to the absence of adequate safety measures. But at the same time, Formula One’s greatest gifts to society at large could turn out to be medical, scientific and technological advances in brain and spine medicine.

Decades of research by the International Automobile Federation, or F.I.A., the sport’s governing body, have led to safety requirements that have saved many lives. But most recent deaths in motor sports have resulted from head injuries to drivers exposed in open cockpits.

Formula One is still reeling from the death in July of Jules Bianchi, a Frenchman who died from a head injury incurred nine months earlier in an accident at the Japanese Grand Prix. Justin Wilson died of head injuries after a crash in the IndyCar series in August. In 2011, another IndyCar driver, Dan Wheldon, also died of head injuries.

But a decade ago, Jean Todt, then Ferrari’s team principal and now the F.I.A. president, enlisted Dr. Gérard Saillant, an orthopedic surgeon and trauma specialist, to help him start a foundation for trauma research. The result was the Brain and Spine Institute, a Paris-based research center known by its French acronym, I.C.M., for Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Épinière.

Saillant, the institute’s founding president and now head of the F.I.A.’s medical commission, said a horrible irony was that the seven-time Formula One champion Michael Schumacher, who suffered a serious brain injury in a skiing accident in 2013, was a founder and major donor to the brain and spine research institute.

“Without auto racing, the I.C.M. would not have existed,” Saillant said. “I would say that, unfortunately, with a wink of history’s eye, the biggest link to the I.C.M.’s existence and car racing is Michael Schumacher. Schumacher — who gave a lot of money, and did not want to announce that — was the second-largest donor.”

In an interview at his office at the I.C.M in Paris, Saillant said that when Todt approached him about starting a foundation, Saillant told him that “trauma medicine is like Formula One, the problems of the chassis, body, the aerodynamics — it’s orthopedics.” He recalled telling Todt, “It’s complicated, but it’s fixable.”

“The problem now in the engines in Formula One is the electronics, computers, assistance,” Saillant added, “and the problem in the future of the 21st century is the brain, and we are very much behind. First, illnesses are becoming more and more common because we are becoming older and older. These are illnesses that existed in the Middle Ages, but we died at 40 years old and you didn’t have the time to get Alzheimer’s. And it is a public health issue. Second, we don’t know much about the brain.”

In 2010, Saillant, Todt and two neurosurgeons started the I.C.M. at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. The hospital has a rich history of studying the brain. It was there, in 1795, that Philippe Pinel, one of the earliest physicians to identify mental illness, was appointed chief physician. A century later, Jean-Martin Charcot, a founder of modern neurology, opened a clinic there in 1882. A young Sigmund Freud spent several months there in 1885, studying with Charcot.

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Michael Schumacher in 2012. The German driver was a major donor behind the creation of the Brain and Spine Institute in Paris.CreditAlex Cruz/European Pressphoto Agency

The I.C.M. founders raised nearly €100 million, or $113 million, to start their institute, which is now housed in a six-story building they built. The F.I.A. and Todt remain among the institute’s donors.

The institute brings together researchers, patients, doctors and business people to study such things as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy and trauma. It has 150 people involved in a medical start-up department, seeking new products for patients.

“The future of neurology is not in the hands of the researchers — and I am not criticizing them — but it is coming through nanotechnology, it is coming from computers, it is coming from bio-statistics, it is coming from things like that,” Saillant said. “The future is in big data and the new technologies, not only in the researcher with his test tube.”

Until last year, most of the companies associated with the institute were French. But they are now an international group, including one connected to Robert Langer’s biomedical engineering laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, another from Canada and another from Germany.

Unlike many structures in France, the I.C.M. is embracing private financing rather than relying entirely on public funding — though the institute does receive some public funds.

“What the United States has known for a long time is that to be in partnership with industry is a way to advance much more quickly, to be more effective, and so to do better research,” said Alexis Génin, a neuroscientist in charge of I.C.M.’s research and technology development. “In France, we had this cultural barrier to say that research must be entirely publicly funded. It has evolved very quickly, and now the young doctors in post-doctoral studies are now completely ready to go into partnership with a company and to develop new tools.”

The institute’s annual operating budget is €55 million, of which half comes from French public funds. Part of the other half comes from industrial contracts through research projects, in partnership with pharmaceutical companies like Sanofi and Pfizer, or with technology companies. The remaining €12 million to €15 million comes from fund-raising.

Among recent research projects is a study of bee venom and its effects on Parkinson’s disease. The project came about after a patient with Parkinson’s disease reported that his symptoms would occasionally disappear for long periods. A bee-keeper, he realized that after he was stung by the bees, he would no longer suffer from the disease for the next few weeks.

There have also been breakthroughs in treatments for multiple sclerosis and epilepsy.

“At one point in Formula One there were many spine injuries,” Saillant said, referring to injuries in the 1990s to Jean Alesi, Mika Salo and Karl Wendlinger. “And we solved that problem mostly with the HANS neck device. That was solved not by the doctors. It was the biomechanists, the engineers.”

As a reminder of where it all came from, there is a large model of a Ferrari racing car in Saillant’s office and a giant photo of Schumacher.